Giving up one’s children is not the same as giving up on them. Let me explain. If one holds the two sets of Buddhist vows, Bodhisattva and Vajrayana, one is pledged not to abandoned beings—nor one’s love for them—as this is the very basis of compassion. Siddhartha Gotama left his family, his father, Suddhodana, mother, Maya, wife, Pimbayasodhara, a son, Rahula, a sister and brother, who like his son became accomplished sangha. He did this after seeing the living examples of what would later become his teaching on the suffering of birth, aging, sickness, and death. I’ve always wondered how in good faith could he do that? Just leave his parents, wife, child, sister, and princely constituents on a seeming whim to explore the causes of the above sufferings? The answer is, they too will then become Enlightened, the supreme goal of the Bodhisattva being the wishing and effecting of complete liberation for all other beings.
Here in Cambodia, one’s future has traditionally held two decisive options: anchakr and potichakr. The first means you live with your family and pay obedience and obeisance to your parents, doing what they say and think is fit for you and the rest of the family. The second means, you’re packed off to the wat (pagata/pagoda), shave your head, become trained in smote, and get up every morning before dawn to do a beautiful chant-like singing of Dharma songs. Also, elders, both yi and tah (grandma and grandpa), can, as achars, retire to the pagata and spend the rest off theirs days in service to its maintenance, as well the care and feeding of the monks. Learning Theravada liturgy, they then return to the community assisting the monks in funeral and wedding services.
If one felt absolutely free to choose, which life is for you? A life of striving to attain material fulfillment, or one of self-sacrifice to attain spiritual enlightenment. (Either for the sake of oneself, or others as well.) It’s a question fundamental to Buddhist faith and practice, not only in a Buddhist country, but everywhere there are practicing Buddhists. It also entails making a big decision about where one’s loyalty lies; a fealty to either one’s parents, to whom you owe your very life, or, the abbot (loak ta/Khenpo/etc.), to whom you then owe your new life, having taken vows and undergone a change in name and form. While wearing the robes, one also owes allegiance to fellow sangha (preah sang) members, in mutual support on the path to Buddhahood. Both options may or may not feed and house you well, and while the first offers gainful employment, if one is able, the second gives you a franchise to gather alms, according to the strictures the Buddha set down for monastics in the Vinaya. This manual for monastics is exhaustive on all matters, providing a formulated basis for Right Livelihood, enabling one’s renunciation of worldly life to strengthen a dedicated pursuit of Enlightenment.
However, if one chooses the ‘other pill,’ the laity thrill ride, then one might inherit the family business or trade—if there is one. A secular household usually has it’s formal and informal ‘house rules,’ established by family customs and the decrees of one’s parents. Depending on the family members position, one’s basic behavior is duly influenced, curbed, or suppressed. The cohesiveness of family members determines its strength, generating a defense against a sometimes hostile outer world. In more traditional, Buddhist countries like Cambodia, where the family unit is still key to its socioeconomic organization, monastic culture, determined by the Vinaya, local and international Theravada customs, bleeds into secular life, and the lives of both sangha family member are often inextricably interwoven, as a Khmer sociology paper reports:
“When a man obtains Buddhist monkshood or ordains as a novice, his family status does not terminate. He is still a child, a husband or a father as he is before obtaining Buddhist monkshood or ordaining as a novice, so he has the rights or duties to maintain his parents or his wife or his child. However, he cannot enter into an engagement or marriage because such doing is contrary to public order or good morals and is void. If he is an illegitimate child, he can take an action for legitimation. Moreover, if he is an illegitimate father, he can take the registration of legitimation. In case of adoption, he cannot be an adopter, but can be the adopted.” (so03.tci-thaijo.org)
The monks are generally looked up to in the family and may be frequently visited at the pagoda, especially during the numerous Buddhist holidays. When they come home, as well, and after taking monastic vows, given by one’s new spiritual parent at the pagoda, the family is again directly influenced by the sangha. However, “they [monastics] also have priest status which causes them [to be] apart from their family and [as] they live in temples [they must] refrain from sexual misconducts. It looks [legally] like that their lives are nearly cut off from layman-life.” (so03.tci-thaijo.org)”
Obviously, then, monastics are also quite different in that they must refrain from numerous lay person’s activities. Also, the monks’ outer lifestyle is anomalous as they gather alms and must wear the robes, according to precise Vinaya and Theravada rules, as opposed to either street clothes, school or job uniforms—day, evening, casual, formal, and night wear. So there are many choices and attendant considerations to just dressing for the layman’s life. A householder’s mind is busied with many such mundane decisions concerning the day’s events before even leaving the house. Whereas the monastics’ is greatly simplified. This frees the adherent to concentrate on memorizing and reciting the required liturgies, and to perform their attendant meditations—a certain path to their ordained goal.
So, in Buddhist cultures and countries—unless the child himself suggests or insists upon it—it’s usually parents and Loak Ta (abbot) who make the decision if the child is to go to the monastery. In the still mostly agrarian Cambodia when, as a good Mahanikaya Theravada Buddhist, when one gives up one’s child to the pagata, they are relinquishing not only a loved one, but a working ‘chattel’ as the son (and it’s mostly sons who are monastics in Cambodia) owe a birth debt to their parents. It’s widely recognized, and wonderfully sang about in smotes (Dharma songs) how the mother and father clean up their babies bodily effluvia, answer all their cries for material and emotional needs, and also, in good families, give the necessary Dharmic support to carry on the virtuous customs of the family. (See, Until Nirvana’s Time, Trent Williams.) In exchange, sons and daughters give services back. Like the proper and attentive greetings to parents and elders—even at large—in recognition of their birth debt. They also labor in and around the house, make monetary contributions to help run the household if they’re older and working outside, and many other material, emotional, and Dharmic ‘returns of favor.’ As anyone who’s watched shows about mafia families might recognize, it’s a mandatory ‘respect’ to repay the Godfather for one’s material, emotional, and cultural survival. In Cambodia, within somewhat more wholesome circumstances, all three of the above ‘supports,’ as they are also the three kinds of ‘giving,’ form the very basis of both a religious and a social virtue, and that’s what the common word used to thank someone is saying: a’kroun, meaning, ‘I recognize your virtue.’
Consider thank you, derived from ‘think,’ and means, ’I will remember what you did for me,’ and much obliged, meaning, ‘I’m in your debt.’ As we know, in street life, and at home, many a favor goes unreturned. Amongst the K’mai, as cash is often scarce, many loans are made between family members that don’t get repaid. Or are unduly tardy. While this is true for money, the above mentioned birth debt, and the good manners it engenders, are never forgotten. In America, where ‘check book parenting’ is unduly practiced, I dare say it’s the other way around.
When I was growing up, the idea that one owed their parents anything seemed absurd. Accordingly, in 1960, Sociologist Paul Goodman wrote, Growing Up Absurd. His argument was, “contrary to the then popular view that juvenile delinquents should be led to respect societal norms…young American men were justified in their disaffection because their society lacked the preconditions for growing up, such as meaningful work, honorable community, sexual freedom, and spiritual sustenance.” (Wikipedia) This much read book among the college educated both reinterpreted and then transformed popular social values on a vast scale. As it was a trendsetter, other writers then wrote similar books. Youth culture in America was born, backed up by rock and roll, Beat and Hipster trends, the antiwar movement, and an ombudsman-like Counter Culture, producing an alternate language, lifestyle, and world view. I remember in California, where I was raised, the family value of togetherness somewhat abruptly morphed into ‘do your own thing.’ A common consensus about what was right and wrong blurred. A lot of ‘house rules’ were bent, or went out the window altogether to suit the younger and older generation’s alternate, independent agendas. One’s personal goals became primary, especially for the counter culturalists, and there was a strong drive to cut out as much personal space as possible so as not to get ‘hassled’ by other family members concerning one’s alternate cultural activities, often illegal, like recreational drug use.
The need for youth to bind with each and move away from the family relates to one of Goodman’s notions that American culture lacked an ‘honorable community.” Also, “sexual freedom,” a glandular and hormonal imperative among younger people necessitated evacuating the family home for a promised freer sex. This often created a crisis within the family, as its chattel work force necessary to assist in maintaining the family resources and to help in the raising younger siblings was lost. Meaningful work, again popular after pandemic lockdowns, while honorable and somewhat akin to ‘right livelihood’ in the Buddha’s Eightfold Noble Path, unfortunately also meant the family business was undesirable. No way was Jimmy going to run the family’s hotdog stand, even if it was lucrative.
All these factors of disaffection, away from lifestyles associated with the nineteen-fifties, radically transformed American values, creating yet another crisis—one of meaning and self worth. Or, “spiritual sustenance” as Goodman deemed it. This then prompted a Human Potential Movement.This movement, according to Wikipedia, “takes as its premise the belief that through the development of their ‘human potential,’ people can experience a life of happiness, creativity, and fulfillment, and that such people will direct their actions within society toward assisting others to release their potential. Adherents believe that the collective effect of individuals cultivating their own potential will be positive change in society at large.” This, combined with the other three popular lifestyle changes—meaningful work, honorable community, sexual freedom—drove a final nail into a gloomy coffin of entombed family customs now deemed square.
My own cultural struggle at this time was pitted against my father and stepmother whom, upon reflection decades later, truly had my best interests at heart. My mother divorced my father in a state of acute schizophrenic bewilderment as well as an authentic social progressiveness—then, often dismissed as ‘borderline personality disorder.’ It hadn’t helped matters that my grandfather, a successful real estate developer and fabled ‘horse trader,’ had pressurized the entire situation. (See, Punkin’s Rough Patch, sarzottj, inkitt.com) My father’s new wife was highly reactive to the new youth movement. At one point, she bought into a propaganda campaign initiated by the Better Business Bureau of America and spread around by numerous church organizations, that all rock’n roll music was subversive, morally depraved, and led to juvenile and adult criminality. She had a younger brother who had been a juvenile delinquent, and later became a felon, whom a few of my school mates used to score ‘dangerous drugs’ from. She loved her brother dearly and, as a successful person, was tortured by his failings. Socially, this made my life hell, especially after my first and last name, the latter well-known in the community, appeared on a juvenile drug users’ list.
At that time, my father said two or three very startling things. First, “If you’re grandfather was still alive, this would kill him.” Second, “I’m not going to hit you because I’m afraid I won’t be able to stop. But if I catch you using drugs again, I swear I’ll kill you with my bare hands.” This was my Grandfather, who himself had big anger management issues, speaking through his son to whom he’d handily bequeathed a verbiage hell he took with him to his grave.
On an immensely more positive side, my father’s reform program for me was to stop his work early and talk to me after school about things like, ‘how’s school?’ and ‘who are your friends?’ But also, on a noninvasive level, about general philosophic topics related to the times. Not easily recoverable, I’d love to remember them verbatim! He also had me speak once a week at Lions Club, an international service club in which he had notable standing, and report on school activities and other things I had absolutely no interest in, like who won the last football game? All things that supported a fifties lifestyle. Despite his best efforts, risking life and limb, I still occasionally ‘got high.’ But now definitely under deep cover. Cumulatively, these efforts greatly slowed down my drug user acculturation and blunted my disaffection from family and community. Consequently, it saved me from developing the same imperiling, chronic to acute, drug habits to which many of my school mates had succumbed. I few years later, once I went away to college, I was able to both buckle down, as they say, and also partake of the exotic Counter Culture now fully available to me. But I also remembered and acknowledged my father’s great kindness.
In my sophomore year, my stepmother, also kind, but truly a worrier, developed catastrophic brain cancer. She went through surgery where, predictably, it metastasized and she died in a relatively shortly time after. While her suffering was surely traumatic for the rest of the family, it utterly destroyed my father, who had loved her dearly. Though I was ‘away at college’—then often an epithet for finally excusing oneself from the family—I was there for almost the entirety of the existentially wrenching event. I did this largely because of the efforts he’d made while I was going through my youthful drug usage period to keep me from harm’s way. Even though a lot of that kindness had been motivated by social pressure, when he really needed somebody, I was there for him one hundred percent. Essentially, he went to a lot of trouble to ‘save me,’ same as a vow-bound Bodhisattva might trying to keep his or her vows, and uphold that vehicle’s entire ethical system. Good parents are like that, the same as Bodhisattvas, when it comes to raising their children. Of course, as we know—or should remember—all sentient beings have been our own children, parents, siblings, spouses, and so forth, from beginningless time. So, rightfully, one must be a universalist in their practice of compassion.
Today, just the idea of a birth debt would be an anathema in any youth culture as affordability of houses and property our out of reach for the younger generations and resentment increases toward the landed elders. This may be true, even in Cambodia, though outward respect for parents, elders, guests and friends, is still mandatory and widely practiced in public. It’s certainly stressed in schools and in families with strong traditional customs. This is especially true in the tenth Khmer month of Pchum Ben, when surviving sons and daughters offer food and prayer to their deceased parents. Consider this Dharma Song,’Hungry Ghosts’ Lament’ and try to imagine it emotively ‘smote’ by Cambodian monks:
“Your parents killed and harmed creatures to find you food and nourish your life. Because of their deep love for you, they suffer now, after their deaths. If we’re truly grateful children, we must remember this vast debt. Don’t make offerings at the bar! You’ll be haunted if you dare.” (Until Nirvana’s Time, Trent Walker, p90.)
The survival of ‘filial piety’ manners, stemming from a birth debt ‘tenet,’ is primarily due to the resurrection of the Buddhist preah sang, and the reestablishing of traditional Khmer culture, gone nearly extinct during the Khmer Rouge cataclysm, nineteen-seventy-five to seventy-nine.
So while birth debt continues to be a mainstay of Theravada Buddhism, it is also explicitly mentioned or implied in the advanced practices of Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism. Having taken refuge in the Three Jewels, one’s name and form is changed, and if one also holds Bodhisattva and Vajrayana vows, you are then like a child to the Guru, the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, until full Enlightenment. The birth debt, as one is born anew by these life changes, now means it’s to them, as well as one’s parents, that one is indebted. In this sense, by ‘going forth’ as the Buddha did, one becomes a child of him as embodied by the Guru. It’s taught within the Sakyapa, and I would think in the other Tibetan Buddhist schools as well, if one must choose between keeping one’s Vajrayana vows, samayas and practice, or, keeping one’s allegiance to a blood family, one’s Vajra Family wins. Hopefully, and as should always be a resourceful Bodhisattva, it should never have to come to this.
Generally, if one has children, one might influence, directly or indirectly, their own entrance into the Diamond Vehicle. Children’s predispositions and social circumstances, however, aren’t always compatible with their parents, as already discussed. In that case, if one day your children and, let’s say, their other parent, suffering some disaffection with you, seeming to have suddenly morphed into Mara and his children, don’t give up on them, but rather give them up, much as Siddhartha did when he left his family in pursuit of full Enlightenment. That one can gain certain insights and strengths stemming from a renunciation of worldly affairs, and also giving up one’s children and parents, is certain. Simply recall Siddhartha’s struggle with Mara under the bodhi tree, where he was masterfully tempted to give up his meditation and regain his worldly throne. Remember too, however, that once he became the Buddha, he never forgot his birth debt and ascended to Akhanittha Heaven to teach his mother the Abhidharma so she too could become Enlightened in a future lifetime. It’s also taught that at least five other people karmically connected to a Bodhisattva, at the time he or she becomes a Buddha, will also become Enlightened. So whenever it is that you do become a Buddha—and it’s guaranteed after a certain level of accomplishment that you will—you may also automatically ripen or through discipleship turn all your pre-Enlightenment family members into stream enterers, just as Shakyamuni did.
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